Chip Kidd’s TED March 2012 talk on the design of book jackets/covers. Fantastic. Funny. Witty. Insightful.

Wells Riley loves startups/entrepreneurship and design. He has compiled an online resource that he hopes will help designers and entrepreneurs speak the same language.

I’ve always been an advocate of publishing/sharing my ideas and thoughts with the wider design/development community. In my experience it results in more informed and rounded conclusions. Louis Lazaris—writing for Smashing Magazine—encourages the documentation of the creative process, along with its subsequent sharing, for similar reasons.

Linds Redding writes for The San Francisco Egotist. In his article ‘A Short Lesson in Perspective’ Linds encourages all of us creative types to be aware of what is important and what isn’t all that important at all. Life’s short.

CSSDeck is a handy resource that's bursting at its seams with some really nice CSS3 trickery.

Ubyu is a service aimed at those who want to create and publish their own high quality bespoke books.

Fast Co. look at the business model approach utilised by Yves Behar/Fuseproject in which they partner with start-ups, take equity as payment and provide design service 24/7—365.

A tumblog that celebrates American made products. It provides a fascinating look at the process and craftsmanship employed by USA-based manufactures of quality products.

An example of great responsive design.

Can design touch someone's heart? More on Leen Sadder's SVA Design as Author submission as previously mentioned on boruburns.com. Leen chose to dress up as Mary Poppins and escort umbrella-less New Yorkers across the street on a rainy day with an hand-lettered umbrella sporting lyrics to 'A Spoonful of Sugar'. She also provided her companions with spoons covered in chocolate. Damn smart idea.

Tamberhouse provide an insight into the design process they followed when designing the sleeve for An Object of Beauty, a book by Steve Martin.

Dan Moll on the differences between Art Direction and Design, and how they compliment each other when combined in a strategic process.

Mobile Application Design & Prototyping Tool.

The Design Council's guide to service design.

"Your one stop website checklist! Launchlist is intended to help and encourage web designers and developers to check their work before exposing it to the world at large."

"Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content. Better content. Content people care about. Content that supports your business objectives and meets your users' goals. It's a long-term fix for content problems of all sizes."

Modern web sites for: magazines, writers, publishers. A San Francisco based studio specialising in providing content providers with fan-dabby-dosey websites and other related shizzle.

Uber fantastic post by Uzi Shmilovici on The 99 Percent blog. The subject: Embracing the importance of sales stratefy in your role as a designer. Brilliant resource/tips for establishing a sales process for my own practice.

From Dustin Curtis, this passes the awesome test hands down: "Mere mortals don’t think of things on their computers as “files.” People think about digital representations of things the same way they think about real physical things: they think about photos, videos, text documents, articles, and people. A “file” on a computer is just a universal container for one of those things."

Information Architects do not disappoint with this pretty thorough overview on the subject of designing for the Apple iPad.

A fantastic introduction to grid systems by Chris Brauckmuller on behalf of Design Informer.

Smashing Magazine's Vitaly Friedman assesses the current state of web design in 2010. He outlines some major trends that are emerging.

Jason Santa Maria: "A Book Apart, a new publisher of brief books for people who make websites, founded by Jeffrey Zeldman, Mandy Brown, and myself. Our first book is HTML5 For Web Designers, by the indomitable Jeremy Keith. If you’re already getting your feet wet with HTML5, or just trying to figure out what the hell it’s all about, you’ll want this one."

"Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for First World problems."

David Walsh gives 7 Quick CSS Enhancements for Better User Experience. Via Mr Turley.

Jared Spool writes on 'User Interface Engineering' about the importance of correct wording and through user testing. By changing one simple button value, Spool helped an unnamed company increase their sales to the tune of $300 million in one year. Removing ambiguity ensures that the user knows exactly where they stand.

BERG London show how they've mapped their Mag+ concept onto the first iPad edition of Popular Science. It looks great and the information flow works fantastically well. It looks slick but I'm not 100% convinced that it functions as well as it could. I'm sure a lot of refinements will happen over the coming months.

Brad Haynes: "The reading experience the iPad can provide is far beyond what we’ve seen before." … " The design principles are the same but the experience is innovative, slick and easy to use. That added sophistication requires a pretty savvy web strategy to plan and execute successfully. And while the barrier for entry is low into the industry, experiences that truly take advantage of all these details are few and far between. It’s a holistic approach that benefits the user. And that approach is entrenched in strategy and planning, design, development and testing. Leave one of those elements off your list of specialties and you’ll end up with a lopsided product and a frustrated user."

"We all like to play God. We like to imagine that the design we create is ushered into the world and all those who use it have an epiphany…they do things exactly in the way we have prescribed. They approach, use, and experience our design in the manner we envisioned, resulting in an amazing user experience."

"PixelPads are a UX designer and developer’s dream. The first and only pixel-based sketchpad system that precisely matches the size and resolution of each companion device."

The Guardian's Mark Porter has recently decided to move on from his post as Creative Director. This URL links to a run-down of his redesign the Guardian's printed edition in 2005.

This showcase of examples provides some great design inspiration and shows how designers have creatively used transparency and overlaying effects to build unique logo designs.

Hi. Thanks for visiting my blog. I wanted to share all the nice books I regularly notice and have collected over the years. Please email me if you have any suggestions or books you want to share. I am an illustrator and pattern designer located in Brooklyn, New York.

Mark Boulton’s 'Designing for the Web' is now available to read for FREE online. I splashed out £5 last year for a UU copy of the PDF and only got as far as the first chapter. I wonder if I'll read any more of it now that it's on the interwebs and not hiding away in a Mac OS X subfolder of a subfolder.

Relpost diggs deep to bring you fresh content from the hottest web designers and the coolest blogs serving you juicy, related goodness. Handpicked related posts for Web Designers.

"I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and I want to share some of my observations here."

"…Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an *engineered product*, while Tumblr is a *designed product*." & "…The second is that for consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology."

Fray began as a website. It presented individually designed, true first-person stories. Each one ended with a question that prompted the audience to tell their stories, too. It evolved into a series of live storytelling events, Fray Days and Fray Cafes, that took place all over the world, attended by thousands of people. Now Fray is evolving again – this time into a quarterly series of independently produced books. Each one will be on a central storytelling theme, and include personal stories, articles, and original art. They come out quarterly. The core of Fray remains unchanged: It’s about true stories. It’s about proving that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. It’s about finding that common thread that connects us all together.

Stories have defined our world. They have been with us since the dawn of communication, from cave walls to the tall tales recounted around fires. They have continued to evolve with their purpose remaining the same; To entertain, to share common experiences, to teach, and to pass on traditions.

The Vacuum is a free monthly paper published in Belfast. Each issue is themed and contains critical commentary about the city and broader cultural issues.

True/Slant is an original content news network tailored to both the “Entrepreneurial Journalist” and marketers who want a more effective way to engage with digital audiences. Contributors, consumers and marketers each have a voice on True/Slant.

True/Slant is the digital home for the “Entrepreneurial Journalist.” Knowledgeable and credible contributors anchor and build their digital brands on True/Slant using tools that enable them to easily create content and craft stories filtered through human perspective (not an algorithm).

NYTimes.com interview Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones about their latest typeface — Vitesse. They've also got something special up their sleeves for this coming year RE: web font technology. Interesting ;)

iPhone and iPod Touch wallpapers created by a selection of designers and illustrators from around the world.

One inspiring creative sharing one piece of advice, all over iChat.

"Fitts' Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target." Includes a "Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts"

I'm a sucker for great looking coming soon pages…

Another eReader?

Andy Budd: "In short, we need educators who are leaders rather than followers. A great example of this are Web Standardistas Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson. These guys lecture on interaction design at the University of Ulster in Belfast. As well as writing a best selling book on standards based design they speak at conferences, organise community events and generally act as part of the glue that keeps our web community together."

Michael Flarup writes about the differences between logos and icons.

Andy Clarke of Stuff and Nonsense is kind enough to share the processes he ran through when he recently redesigned the CannyBill website.

Naz Hamid: "While we’re focusing on design for higher education, we’ll also look at what we’ve learned by designing for higher education and how it affects design for other types of websites and organizations." I'll be keeping an eye out for commentary coming from this SXSW panel.

iA: "UX Design. [It's] Sort of preposterous isn’t it? The idea that someone thinks they can control how you feel."

iA: "Technology often develops from primitive to complicated to simple. The web develops faster and is more client focused than traditional technologies. Web development is cheaper, more flexible and most importantly: everyone can contribute to its development. In concrete terms: Better interaction design, less graphic design. Better user experience, less debates about taste. Faster technology, more reliable design standards…"

Check out these brilliant keynote videos from TYPOBerlin. The talks by Martin Majoor (the creator of one of my favourite typefaces — Scala) and the brilliant Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones are a must watch. The presentations are from years gone by but they're still completely relevant… if not more so nowadays, given the sudden influx of typefaces at a web-designers disposal owing to Typekit and other @font-face platforms.

Times Skimmer is a browser-based application that offers a new way to read The New York Times online. The application provides the experience of spreading out a newspaper and paging through it. Times Skimmer offers multiple display options and easy-to-use keyboard shortcuts. The fonts in the application are the same as those used in the printed newspaper.

Squarespace's Creative Director Tyler Thompson redesigns airline boarding cards. Epic.

Serial newspaper designer Mario Garcia reviews the importance of typographic contrast in graphic design. Garcia uses Tyler Thompson's airline boarding passes as an example of a measured and subtle utilisation of bold type that provides necessary contrast between elements of text.

Jason Santa Maria on A List Apart: "As more typefaces hit the scene, we need to understand how they can best serve our designs, and to push ourselves to move beyond mere novelty in our selections. If much of the web is made up of text—and it is—web typography can be a very powerful tool indeed."

Naz Hamid: "So, get to know your client well, do the research, do what is right, not what is now and trendy and because Apple/Facebook/xxxxxx does it. Listen, communicate, design well."

Wilson Miner comments on his sand-box: "I started this site as an excuse to experiment with design and CSS. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed the writing as well. It’s nice to have a place to record and share those stories and observations."

Wilson Miner: "Every designer is wired differently. Some people are idea people, some people are artists. I'm an optimizer."

Wilson Miner writes about sizing fonts in CSS — "Design for the ideal, build for flexibility".

Carsonified's Keir Whitaker interviews SimpleBit's Dan Cederholm on Bulletproof Web Design, CSS3 and Dribbble.

With LAIKA, there is finally a font that can seamlessly use the whole spectrum of its cuts. A font that is able to move between its extremes in real time. An interactive font that is able to respond to its surroundings. A font that questions deadlocked dogmas and throws up completely new design questions, and thus has the potential to revolutionise the understanding of digital typography.

Via iA: Most websites are crammed with small text that’s a pain to read. Why? There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small.

Via iA: "95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography."

Last month, students in Jason Santa Maria’s Communicating Design class (School of Visual Arts — MFA in Interaction Design) were assigned the task of designing their own local currency. Inspired by Ithaca Hours and BerkShares, students pulled a neighborhood out of a hat, and were asked to research their neighborhood to determine what characteristics should be represented on its currency.

Just—My—Type™ is a side project of designer Jakob Nylund / Formconspiracy. All typefaces are free to download and free to use without any restrictions.

Business guides for designers. A free Design Council resource for design professionals.

Support typographic diversity. Use a few of Font Fonts underused fonts.

The first of a five-part series of articles from 2005 by Mark Boultan.

Andrew Maier provides UX Booth readers with a… well… ‘Complete Beginner’s Guide to Interaction Design’ funnily enough.

[Site: Mr Munroe] Lee showcases some lovely iPhone app websites.

I like how this spare room/home office has been fitted out.

Bill Buxton: “Just forget about graphical consistency across browsers. When you think about browsers and the interactions we have over the Internet as being this rich, it’s just absurd… Basically, the only thing that matters in terms of consistency going forward is consistency of the quality of user experience. And until we get that, by trying to make things consistent on every single browser on every single platform, we completely degrade the quality of user experience—or we homogenize it to the point where it’s just boring and mediocre.”

[Ezine: Azure] Michael Bierut of Pentagram NY shares seven steps to success.

[Article: NY Times] How type crimes frustrate designers.

Typefaces For The Professional Artist

Alfredo Trivino describes his redesign of ‘The Australian’ newspaper.

Full-time and freelance job opportunities for web, design, and creative professionals